Music as defined by the Oxford English dictionary , the arrangement of sounds of one or more voices or instruments, I think is the only thing in the world that (yet) can’t be defined based on religion, caste or color.

I am more biased towards Indian style of music since I have been listening to it all these years. I am more into traditional and ghazals type of music. Ghazals , the ancient art of poetry where each ghazal is similar to a song but composed of a set of 2 liners called as sher s. The beauty of this kind of poetry is that though a ghazal may be made of many sher s , each individual sher can cover different topics and are usually unrelated to the sher s in the same ghazal.

I recently had some experiences which led me to think music as an universal bonding agent .I would like to share some of these experiences with you.

1. When I was doing my school at Oklahoma State University, I had a friend who used to play synthesizer beautifully. Since he was a South Indian he didn’t understand a lot of Hindi ( OSU FAKIRS -You know who I am talking about -right?) but when he listened to Ghulam Ali for the first time , the musician in him was so happy that I could make out the joy from his face – though he was not understanding what Ghulam Ali was singing -as it was in Urdu. What bonded him with the Pakistani singer was the melody and was beyond the barrier of language ,religion and nation.

2. I am big time into MP3 music and have about 2 Gigs worth of music on my work server (which I fondly call as “gross misuse of power:)”). I had all my music in a separate folder called “Desi songs”. Since my co-workers had their music (with groups like : Nine Inches Nail, Korn , Rage against machines ..etc in other words eXXtremely loud bands), we had a network share to all our songs. So one day I came across this guy who asked me if I was an Indian and the songs in the “desi songs” were mine. When I said yes , he told me that he once out of curiosity had listened to one of the songs and was addicted to listening to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan – this American guy could not even say Nusrat ‘s name correctly but was enjoying the music of the great Qawwal!!

3. I recently had a chance to listen to Jagjit Singh Live !It was an awesome experience and Jagjit Singh was at his own best (I got some good pictures of him and also his autograph and a handshake!!). The show went on for 4 hours flat. He had promised to sing Punjabi songs in the end and so he did. He sung his extremely rhythmic Punjabi tunes which made many people in the crowd to stand up and start dancing. Many in the crowd were dancing in the aisle , dancing literally to Jagjit Singh’s tunes . And when he was done with the Punjabi songs as a last song he sung ” Chitti na koi sandesh” and lo ! every body in the audience including those dancing went in a pin drop silence and changed the entire mood of the audience. How much power of the phenomenon called as music.

Salaam to this great phenomenon which is hard to believe based on just 7 things :